Every working DJ builds a rough tempo map in their head: house sits here, drum and bass lives up there, and a surprising number of genres pile up around 128. This is that map, written down. Use it to plan transitions, spot mislabelled tracks, and decide where a tune belongs in a night. If you just need to check one file, drop it into the free Lexicon BPM finder and get the tempo back in a couple of seconds without installing anything.
The tempo reference
Ranges below are the tempos you will actually meet in a DJ context, with the sweet spot where most tracks in that style cluster. Treat them as guidance, not law. Producers push edges on purpose, and a lot of overlap is deliberate.
| Genre | Typical range (BPM) | Common sweet spot |
|---|---|---|
| Hip-hop / boom-bap | 85-100 | 88-95 |
| Trap | 130-150 (often felt at 70-75) | 140 |
| Downtempo / lo-fi | 80-110 | 90-100 |
| House (general) | 118-130 | 122-128 |
| Deep house | 118-124 | 120-123 |
| Tech house | 122-128 | 124-127 |
| Progressive house | 124-132 | 128 |
| UK garage | 130-135 | 132 |
| Big room / festival EDM | 126-132 | 128 |
| Trance | 128-145 | 136-140 |
| Techno (minimal / deep) | 125-132 | 128-130 |
| Techno (peak-time / driving) | 132-150 | 138-145 |
| Dubstep | 138-142 (felt at ~70) | 140 |
| Drum and bass | 160-180 | 172-174 |
Sources broadly agree on these bands even if the exact edges shift by a beat or two: see the tempo guides from Ableton's Learning Music, BPM Techno, and pitchd.
Why the ranges overlap so much
Look at the table and you will notice house, tech house, progressive house, garage, big room and minimal techno all crowd into roughly 122 to 132 BPM. That is not sloppiness, it is the point. Tempo is only one of several things that separate genres. House, techno, trance and garage can all sit at 128 and still sound nothing alike, because the real difference lives in the drum pattern, the sound design, the harmonic content, the arrangement and the cultural context.
For a DJ this is good news. It means a large slice of four-on-the-floor dance music is beatmatch-compatible out of the box. You can move from a tech house groove into a progressive roller into a driving techno cut without touching the tempo fader, and let energy and texture do the talking instead. The BPM is the easy part. Selection is the craft.
It also explains why genre tags alone are a bad way to plan a set. Two tracks labelled "house" might be a 119 deep house warmup tool and a 130 peak-time weapon. The tempo tells you far more about where a track fits in the night than the genre label does.
Half-time and double-time: mixing across tempos
The table has two big gaps, one between roughly 100 and 118 (above hip-hop, below house) and one between 145 and 160 (above techno, below drum and bass). Those gaps are exactly where half-time and double-time relationships become useful, because a track can bridge them by being counted at twice or half its written tempo.
The classic pairings:
- Hip-hop at 87 and drum and bass at 174. Double the hip-hop and it locks to the DnB. This is how you slam an a cappella or a boom-bap loop over a rolling 174 break.
- Dubstep and trap felt at ~70, written at 140. The kick pattern reads as half-time, so a 140 dubstep tune sits comfortably against a 140 trance record even though they feel like different speeds.
- House at 124 and a hip-hop or downtempo piece at 62. Halving a house track opens up slower blends for a warmup or a closing stretch.
The practical trick is that your ears count the perceived tempo, but the beatgrid counts the written one. When you beatmatch across a half-time gap, sync to the written BPM (174 to 174) and trust that the half-time feel of one track will read as a groove on top, not as a train wreck. Get the phrasing right and these transitions are some of the most dramatic moves you can pull.
Tempo and where it sits in the night
Ranges are most useful when you map them onto the shape of a set rather than reading them as trivia. A typical club night climbs in tempo as it climbs in energy:
- Warmup (roughly 118-123): deep house, dub techno, slower grooves. You are setting a room, not testing it.
- Build (123-128): tech house and rolling progressive. The floor commits here.
- Peak (128-140): driving techno, big room, trance, the loudest hour.
- Comedown or afters (back to 120-125, or a half-time drop): ease the tempo down, or pivot into a half-time hip-hop or downtempo stretch to reset before the last push.
None of this is fixed, a drum and bass or hardcore set lives at the top of the chart all night, and a listening bar might never leave 90. But knowing the ranges lets you spot when a track is a tempo you cannot get to cleanly from where you are, which is the single most common cause of an awkward transition.
Building tempo crates in Lexicon
Once you think in tempo bands, it helps to have your library sorted the same way. Lexicon's Analyzer detects BPM and builds an accurate beatgrid for every track, alongside key and energy, so the tempo values you filter on are trustworthy rather than whatever a store or a rip claimed.
From there you can lean on Smartlists, Lexicon's rules-based smart playlists, to turn those tempo bands into crates that maintain themselves. Add a numeric BPM rule to a Smartlist, for example everything under 122 BPM for a warmup pool, or a mid-range band for your build section, and any track that matches drops in automatically as your library grows. Combine a BPM rule with an energy or key rule and you have an opener crate that is filtered by tempo and mood at once, ready before you even open the DJ software.
If you want to double check a single file before it goes into the library, the browser-based Lexicon BPM finder analyses one track locally and lets you pick a genre-aware detection range, which is the fastest way to catch a half-time or double-time misread before it poisons your beatgrids. Get the tempo right at import, sort into bands, and the rest of the reference above turns from theory into a set that flows.
